“Bach is not boring,” declares Cyprien Katsaris. But I’m afraid that, in his hands, Bach ever so slightly is. Katsaris makes rather more of an impassioned verbal than musical case for playing this “Italian” Bach on a modern concert grand; and a proper musical case does have to be made, as a bulging catalogue attests.
The fingers drop with a dead weight on to the hammers of a sturdy Italian Concerto; and the jacks don’t seem to leap up at all. Loud and soft are duly (and occasionally perversely) observed, but with all too little in between. Phrase endings are blunt, tone lacklustre. Katsaris’s imagination simply doesn’t seem to encompass the range of weights and measures, and the shifting qualities of articulation on offer in this music.
He speaks, of course, of exploring the piano’s “orchestral” possibilities in Bach’s keyboard transcriptions of the Vivaldi concertos. But again, the bright “brass” resonance at the start of the D major (BWV972) is dimmed, while the melodic line sings with under-characterized voice out of the nicely placed chords of the D major’s slow movement. For the G minor (BWV975) Katsaris demonstrates physical, if not imaginative, dexterity in a delicately ornamented slow movement. But the gumboots are well and truly on again for the jig. The Toccata in G offers a livelier dappling of light and shade but, again, so much in both the instrument and the score is under-exploited.'